IE 9 had a good run and it will still be available for testing but I’m going to switch the default WPT location to use Chrome instead of IE 9.
This probably only matters if you are using the API without specifying a location explicitly because the UI will remember what browser (and location) you last used. If you are using the API and want any trended results to continue with IE 9 you should explicitly specify Dulles_IE9.
I still recommend testing with older browsers periodically to make sure the performance across all browsers is what you expect but there are a fair number of benefits in changing the default to Chrome:
For sites that implement SPDY, HTTP 2 or tune their TLS settings you will actually see the benefits of those changes in the (default) tests
I may expose the timeline features by default which will give insight into JS execution times
There will be fewer contention for testing resources. The Chrome, Firefox and Safari tests can run on all of the test machines while the IE tests need to be targeted at specific subsets. That makes ~50% more test machines available in the general pool.
Increases the availability of IE 10 and IE 11 testing (by allowing me to reduce the pool of IE 9 test machines)
I’ll probably make the shift on Monday 12/22 so let me know before then if you have any concerns.